Letter From the Desert: Masculinity

I have been thinking about what it means to be a man.

This is not a new pastime for me. I’m about 50 years in. My questioning started at roughly the time I became a man, physiologically speaking. I was slight of build, timid and not particularly athletic, prone to injury and to deep sadness, and so the standard social definition of masculinity was in many ways merely aspirational for me.

I later realized it is merely aspirational for everyone born male — or who chooses¹ to become male — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

The platonic ideal of Man I was offered as a youngster, with the mostly unspoken expectation that I would adopt it as a model, was not entirely negative. Characteristics such as being ready to stand up for what’s right, to tell uncomfortable truths, to protect those who could use protection, all informed my sense of the kind of man I wanted to become.

This is to a certain degree the way I was raised. In the early 1980s, when my father learned I did not intend to register for the draft, he was something between disappointed and irate. I was not upholding my obligation to society, he told me. Some weeks later he saw me on television, on local news, talking about my refusal to register and encouraging others to consider doing likewise. The next time I saw him he was full of praise. He still did not agree with my stance, but he was proud as hell of the fact that I said something public and prominent rather than just hoping the FBI would never catch up with me.

Steadfastness, honesty, protecting others, and the other potentially positive aspects of what we call masculinity are obviously not the sole province of men. Masculinity is not the inverse of femininity. The two ideas do not live on opposite ends of a single spectrum. A healthy person contains some of each, in a proportion unique to them, lumps of unblended ingredients in the gravy of one’s personality.

And to be clear, I am sympathetic to the argument that both “masculine” and “feminine” are outmoded concepts, useful for conjugating Romance languages and not much else.

If you were to base your judgment on the loudest voices among us, you might decide that this view of masculinity’s theoretically positive traits has fallen out of favor. Instead, the ideal man, as currently proposed by those loudest of voices, seems to be a phenomenally brittle thing. He is:

• avaricious

• unwilling to display emotion other than lust and anger

• likely to hold on to any hurt, real or imagined, and to seek vengeance for that hurt

• given to cruelty for its own sake in some situations

• subject to feelings of entitlement regardless of actual merit

• a captive of zero-sum assumptions

• hostile to nuance

• hostile to learning

• uninterested in the feelings of others

• violent or supportive of violence

• terrified of the world

One could go on, but I think that’s sufficient, if a bit of a generalization. Many men who are otherwise fine people have had to confront these feelings in themselves, drilled in through years of socialization. I’m no exception. You could ask my exes.

A question from long ago, asked by someone considering moving to the desert: “I’m worried about snakes and coyotes. Should I buy a gun?” I thought of that question when I was getting to know the local desert kit foxes. Walking at sunset, heading down a slope toward my house, I saw movement near a swiss cheese warren I’d noticed a few times. Out of one of the holes popped what was unmistakably the head of a desert kit fox, with its ridiculous ears so large in comparison to its head that it could not have been anything else.

Desert kit fox. Chris Clarke photo.

A few others showed up. They regarded me with some alarm. I sat down in the middle of the fire road I had been walking, watched them in my peripheral vision. They quickly decided not to worry too much about me. Some of them took to hunting whatever happened by: small rodents, insects, baby thrashers, hallucinations. The nearest one, only six or seven meters away, sat with her back to me. We watched the desert turn to night sitting there, together, a bond of trust established at least for the moment.

A week later, visiting the warren with some friends, we watched as a group of dirt bikers parked their rides more or less atop the network of burrows, revving their engines loudly for about ten minutes. When next I was able to check on the warren, the foxes had moved on.

Which version of masculinity seems better to you? Which seems healthier, more sustainable?

Another story: on my first long visit to the desert in 1997, ten years before I moved here for good, I was traveling between camps and found myself stuck in standstill traffic on I-15 in Downtown Las Vegas. After ten minutes of not moving at all, I turned off the truck and stepped out onto the asphalt. The fellow in the truck behind me did likewise. We chatted. He was staying at the Thunderbird, which now styles itself a “boutique” hotel, the “boutique” apparently meaning “we got a good deal on salvaged barn wood.” In 1997 it was more of a seedy unreclaimed relic of the 1960s, declining after most casinos moved to the strip south of town, stuck in a neighborhood that had not yet quite been reinvented as the “Vegas Arts District.” I had been sleeping in the desert, I told him. He looked at me, mouth agape. “Do you have a gun? I could never do that without a gun.”

The desert had been surprisingly hospitable, if a bit cold at night. In the previous three weeks I had had only one unpleasant encounter, and that was on the streets of St. George, Utah, where a group of bored teenage boys hurled a homophobic insult at me from their speeding F-150.

I looked at my companion, standing there in the paralyzed fast lane of I-15 off Fremont Street, and wondered at the distinct differences in our world views. Leaving the desert aside, I’ve lived and worked in probably more than my share of sketchy neighborhoods in Buffalo, Oakland, DC, Los Angeles, and other places. I’ve had mainly pleasant encounters, and a minority of unhappy ones that are nonetheless too many for me to remember them all. Some of those encounters have involved people threatening me. I have never once had an experience that I have thought, even in retrospect, would have gone better for me if I’d had a gun.

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At about the same time I started sprouting reluctant facial hair, I fell under the influence of the only religious text that still means anything to me: The Daodejing (or in the more familiar Wade-Giles transliteration, the Tao Te Ching). In particular, I mean the translation of the Daodejing from the original Chinese by Gia Fu Feng with photography by Jane English. This most popular translation of the Tao in the United States was widely available to folks like me in the mid 1970s.

Chapter 76

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the discipline of death.
The gentle and yielding is the discipline of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

I credit the text with getting me started on rejecting the 1970s-era equivalent of the ideology of today’s strutting red-pilled self-proclaimed alpha male. That unbending tree is a superb cautionary tale.

Or take this passage:

Chapter 24

He who stands on tiptoes is not steady.
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who is self-righteous is not respected.
He who boasts achieves nothing.²
He who brags will not endure.
According to the Tao. "These are extra food and unnecessary luggage."
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore the followers of the Tao avoid them.

Or this one:

Chapter 33

Knowing others is wisdom:
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires forces:
Mastering the self needs strength.
He who knows he has enough is rich.
Perseverance is a sign of willpower.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to he eternally present.

I can by no means claim that I am an expert in the meaning, idiom, or cultural significance of the Daodejing. The text is often opaque, even in the straightforward Gia Fu Feng translation. Interpretations by Chinese religious scholars sometimes directly contradict each other. Choosing from among them is well above my pay grade.

But the more clearly intended of the passages about unbending trees, and boasting, and the difference between knowing others and knowing the self, are an important part of what has shaped my thinking about how to be a man in this world. It is the masculinity of taking deep breaths, of listening even when it is difficult, of love for those different from me.

It is the masculinity I hope some of those loudest voices will eventually mature into.

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Thank you all so much for your support during this weirdest of years. As a journalist and activist married to a federal public servant, the next four years bear their share of potential for unnecessary hardship, as they do for so many people in the United States and elsewhere. About 92.5 percent of the subscribers to this newsletter are non-paying subscribers. Cutting that to closer to 50 percent would help ensure this newsletter, and its author, will survive 2025. Please consider kicking in the $5/month to become a paying subscriber.

Thank you, and Happy New Year. Have another kit fox photo:

Chris Clarke photo

1. I know “chooses” isn’t the right word. Suggestions welcome.

2. I credit my admiration for this line as an explanation for being less than enthusiastic about fundraising.